Your Right to Know

The expected announcement that Veterans Memorial will be demolished for a $50 million arts venue
has been postponed indefinitely.

Guy Worley, president of the Columbus Downtown Development Corp., told Columbus and Franklin
County officials recently that the plan is delayed because there isn’t enough money.

That’s probably the last word until after the November election.

The project has been delayed for more than a year because there is as much as a $10 million
shortfall in what’s needed to remake the Scioto Peninsula, across the river from Downtown. Worley’s
group is trying to plug the gap.

Limited founder Leslie H. Wexner and his wife, Abigail, are putting up $25 million for the new
arts facility.

The redevelopment plan also includes a new, separately funded, permanent attraction from the
Columbus Zoo and Aquarium and retail and residential development along Broad Street.

• • •

People sometimes show up to protest outside the Statehouse, but their target usually isn’t a
suburb. That’s why Gerald Dixon’s appearance on Tuesday afternoon at the corner of Broad and 3rd
streets raised a few eyebrows.

Dixon’s beef with the city involves code-enforcement officers who he says are trespassing on
private property. He’s been protesting in Whitehall for a couple of weeks — and has tussled with
city officials for years — but he said he didn’t feel like he was getting anywhere there.

Maggard said that’s because Whitehall residents largely ignore Dixon, who, she said, is upset
that code enforcers simply do their job.

“He is a bit of a performance artist,” Maggard said, “and when he doesn’t get the reaction he
thinks he deserves, he steps it up a bit.”

• • •

So yesterday, a new law took effect in Marysville that bans tobacco use on all city-owned
property.

But while surveying the crowd at a recent block party in uptown Marysville, Mayor John Gore
realized that perhaps the new ordinance is a little
too strict.

“There were all these people standing around on the streets puffing away and I thought, ‘Uh,
technically, a street is city-owned property and they can’t do that,'" Gore said. “Basically, if
you are in a car smoking a cigarette while driving down a street, that would be a violation,
too."

Now, before anyone loses her Kools, hold on. No one intends to enforce it that way, Gore
said.

He soon will ask the city council to clean up the legislation, making it clear that it applies
only to parks, city buildings, the municipal pool and so on.

Although he is a reformed smoker and disapproves of the habit now, Gore says to those who
partake in their cars on Main Street: Smoke ’em if you got ’em.